Category: Film
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Welcome to 1970. The velvet-lined dream of the 1950s Gothic revival has not just ended; it has been eviscerated. Outside the gates of Bray Studios, the world is screaming. The counterculture has turned into a permanent riot, the Vietnam War is a televised charnel house, and the youthquake has moved on from ghost stories to…
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The folks over at Paramount have just dropped their upcoming Scream 7 Superbowl trailer via Dread Central. In the new trailer, Sidney Prescott, her family, and friends (once again) have to fight for their lives against a fresh Ghostface killer. But not Method Man. Directed by Kevin Williamson, from a script he co-wrote with Guy…
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Let’s get one thing straight before we step into this particular circle of cinematic hell: Italian horror in 1989 was not a place of prestige. It was a graveyard of ambition. The golden age of Mario Bava and Dario Argento had curdled into a landscape of diminishing returns, where the masters were tired, the budgets…
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There are films you love because they’re good. There are films you love because they’re important. And then there are films you love because something in them is fundamentally wrong, and it presses a button you don’t fully understand. Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory is that third kind of film. This is a 1961 Italian…
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The year is 1970. The psychedelic haze of the late sixties has drifted away, leaving behind the cold, grey morning of a new decade. For Hammer Film Productions, the Gothic castle was no longer a sanctuary; it was a cage. The audience had seen the stakes, the garlic, and the crosses a hundred times over.…
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The year is 1969. The Summer of Love has curdled into the Manson murders, the Vietnam War is a rhythmic pulse of televised slaughter, and the Gothic dream—that mist-shrouded world of tragic monsters and velvet-clad visionaries—is bleeding out on the floor. In this cultural twilight, Hammer Film Productions released Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. It did…
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The Undertaker (1988… ish) opens the only way a certain kind of late-80s horror film knows how: with a woman in immediate danger, a road that looks like it hasn’t seen a living soul since Nixon resigned, and dialogue so aggressively stupid it feels like it’s daring you to turn the film off What’s this?…
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Silent Hill 2 is known among survival-horror fans as a near-perfect entry in the genre. As a psychological horror game, it touches upon serious and mature themes, many that even today most game developers wouldn’t dare address. The game speaks of euthanasia, sexual assault, frustration, guilt, murder, and death. Yet it also deals with themes…
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Hammer’s Dracula Has Risen from the Grave arrives not as a resurrection, but as an accusation. This is not the aristocratic seducer of Horror of Dracula, nor the vengeful revenant of Prince of Darkness. This Dracula is something more corrosive and more disturbing: a consequence. A curse summoned not by ritual, but by guilt. A…
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By 1968, Hammer Films was standing on unstable ground. The Gothic cathedral they had spent a decade building—brick by blood-soaked brick—was beginning to crack. The world was changing faster than the studio could repaint its castle walls. Youth culture had turned feral. Authority was suspect. Faith was eroding. Horror itself was mutating into something colder,…